1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods and apparatus for teaching language communication.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Conventional methodologies of language instruction usually involve a teacher and student relationship known as the "fixed superordinate-subordinate dyad," that is, an instructional pair with the student in the subordinate position. The student is usually fixed in the communication role of respondent, while the superordinate teacher rotates momentarily and continuously amoung the roles of producer of stimuli and evaluator of the student's responses to the stimuli. The basic mental operation is usually pair association, wherein the basic stimulus is one of any group of items. The basic response is selection of that item from a group of items that is most closely related to or associated with the stimulus item.
The components of conventional language instruction are neither fixed nor concertedly agreed upon. However, it can be said that the basic components are frequently referred to as being reading, writing, speaking, listening and vocabulary, with the first two generally being paired together, and the second two also being paired together. That is, students tend to respond orally to the teacher's oral stimuli, and in writing to the teacher's written stimuli when students individually respond. Vocabulary study tends to occur within the other four components, but it is generally presented, at least to some extent, as a separate component. When there is such formal instruction in vocabulary, it is generally achieved by a verbal definition of the term's usage in a given context, especially for terms that cannot be easily pictorially defined. It is only through exposure to words in various contexts that the student infers which one of a group of synonyms is more appropriate for a particular context, and formal instruction is not generally focused on producing such inferences.
In this type of instruction, because no single skill is taught independently to a high criterion level before an attempt is made to provide another skill, error identification is complex and covert. The services of a professional are usually required both to detect errors and to identify the source of each. It should be noted that this conventional teaching of various language skills concurrently is not arbitrary, but necessary, in view of the limitations of the fixed communication role.
Because conventional methodologies usually involve student interaction with a very limited number of others, communication idiosyncrasies are developed and reinforced, leading to speech which is not well understood by native speakers of the target language. In addition, a student's knowledge of the correctness of his responses is achieved always from the instructor and only on those occasions when that instructor can attend to responses from that student.
The phenomena with which any student must cope during conventional instruction are selected by the professional, and, even if the student is instructed to proceed undeviatingly through a workbook, the grouping and sequencing of phenomena are not readily apparent to most students, and the learning task on any page is far from clear. What material any student is to be tested on, and the precise nature of such testing, are seldom revealed to any student prior to that student being tested. Hence, in conventional instruction the phenomena presented to the student to respond to are seldom anticipated, and what constitutes correctness of response tends to be quite vague.
A number of language teaching methods and apparatus have been devised for use by students arranged in dyads where each partner of a dyad is a student, rather than one being a teacher or professional. However, most of these operate on the same basic principles as the other conventional language instruction methodologies discussed above, in that the students, while their roles may rotate, are nevertheless placed in superordinate-subordinate relationship. These methods suffer many of the same disadvantages as those of the above discussed conventional methodologies.